"Clown" was
the mildest of many dramatic characters in which he represented him.
When, later, such outpourings of excessive zeal stared at him from the
printed page, and his friends complained, he would be vexed at his
rudeness, upbraid himself, and honestly repent. But repentance availed
little, for on the next occasion he would commit the same fault; and
Spalatin had some reason to look distrustfully upon a projected
publication even when Luther proposed to write very gently and tamely.
His opponents could not equal him in his field. They called names with
equal vigor, but they lacked his inward freedom. Unfortunately it
cannot be denied that this little appendage to the moral dignity of
his nature was sometimes the spice which made his writings so
irresistible to the honest Germans of the sixteenth century.
In the autumn of 1517 he had got into a quarrel with a reprobate
Dominican friar; in the winter of 1520 he burned the Pope's bull. In
the spring of 1518 he had prostrated himself at the feet of the Vicar
of Christ; in the spring of 1521 he declared at the Diet of Worms,
before the emperor and the princes and the papal legates, that he
believed neither the Pope nor the Councils alone, only the testimony
of the Holy Scripture and the interpretation of reason. Now he was
free, but excommunication and outlawry hovered over his head. He was
inwardly free, but he was free as the beast of the forest is free, and
behind him bayed the blood-thirsty pack.
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